Thanks to a little personal chaos, I arrived late to hearing Donald Trump’s “law and order” speech, which is really more accurately entitled a “Dear African-Americans, please get off the grim, crime-ridden, paranoid Democrat plantation and step out into the light as a free citizen in a free country.” It’s a doozy of a speech, saying in explicit terms what every American, especially every Black American, should hear.

Incidentally, because of that slight personal chaos in my life, I almost missed the speech entirely. The MSM swiftly buried it as if it had never happened. I think each of us who cares about America, and who cares that America’s opportunities be extended to all individuals, not just wealthy Democrat cronies, must remind voters that Hillary’s politics are a dead-end. Truly a dead-end, in that they lead us to a fetid, locked-off alley, choked with crime and poverty.

Anyway, here’s the speech, in which Trump reaches out explicitly to the African-American community, detailing the wrongs done to them under generations of Democrat governance and promising them that they will be treated with the same respect accorded people in peaceful suburbs — that is, the law-abiding will be honored, not the criminals. My guess is that, even if you don’t like Trump, you’ll still like what he has to say:

One of the parts of Hillary’s early history that people find most repulsive is the fact that in 1975 she represented a child rapist, Thomas Alfred Taylor, so successfully that she got him off with only two months time served. This video gives some information about that case, including Hillary’s own words after the fact. After you watch the video, I have a few comments (and if the video doesn’t play, go here):

Gun control proponents have a problem. Irrefutable data shows that, since 1992, as American gun ownership has gone up, crime has gone down. When pressed about the dramatic decrease in crime, the best that the Left can do is to point to anything but the increase in privately held weapons:

Possible reasons for the decline include the country’s high incarceration rate, an aging population and an increased use of security cameras and cell phone videos capturing incidents.

If gun grabbers were forced to grapple with the fact that the increase in guns tracking precisely with the decrease in crime, they’d also have to acknowledge that all the aging Americans, the imprisoned Americans, and the video cameras are irrelevant. Why? Because if more guns really meant more crime, as they insist, the 300 million guns in America today would more than offset age, imprisonment, and video.

The fact is — as even the CDC was forced to admit — that guns are used defensively as often as 1.2 million times a year. This short John Stossel piece gives a very down-and-dirty explanation for the fact that, while guns are a problem when they’re in criminal hands, they’re not a problem in the hands of law-abiding citizens (and, in America, most citizens are law-abiding or at least non-violent):

So what do you do if you desperately want gun control, but the data refuses to cooperate? Well, I can imagine Lucifer and his chief minion having a meeting that goes something like this:

The scene: A well-appointed office in Hell. Satan, in a snazzy red suit is seated behind a heavy oak desk. Standing in front of the desk, facing him, is Jezebeth, a pimply young demon, who’s one of his primary Earth operatives. The year: 2009.

Black lives don’t matter. How do I know this? Because if black lives really mattered, blacks would stop killing each other. Blacks would stop committing genocide against themselves by aborting more children than they allow to be born. Blacks would stop consigning generations to poverty by having the majority of their children out-of-wedlock. And blacks would stop treating education as punishment and instead treat it as an opportunity.

Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole “Black Lives Matter” movement, with its insistence that everyone has to change except for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claim black lives.

Here’s a bit of data to support my premise:

According to The Guardian, which tracks the number of people who die at the hands of American police (an interesting thing for a British paper to track, right?) in 2015 American police allegedly killed 1,146 people. Of those, 79 were unarmed blacks (or not quite 7% of those killed). So far in 2016, American police have allegedly killed 566 people, of whom 24 were unarmed blacks (or 4% of those killed). While I wish each of those numbers was zero, the fact is that they are an infinitesimally number compared to the almost 40,000,000 blacks in America.

I’m sure some of those shootings were the results of bad decision-making in the heat of the moment, with a small percentage definitely reflecting police malevolence or even racism. But let’s put those numbers in perspective before we get too upset.

In 2015, 129 officers died in the line of duty. So far in 2016, 61 officers have died in the line of duty. To give some perspective, we need to know how many police there are in America, which is a little hard to nail down because there are so many different kinds of police, ranging from federal to state to county to municipal, etc. A rough estimate, though, puts the total number of police at around 1.1 million. One doesn’t have to run the numbers to realize that police die at criminal hands at a greater rate than unarmed black people die at police hands.

In other words, if anyone should be out protesting on America’s streets, it’s the cops.

So if police aren’t doing all the killing what are the real scourges in the black community, scourges over which the cops have no control:

The scourge that allows Obama and fellow Leftists to start calling for “gun control” is black on black murders. Although the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies are getting increasingly shy about reporting racial statistics in connection with violent crime, in 2010 the DOJ published an analysis looking at violent crime from 1980 through 2008. Its conclusions on race were stark — blacks are grimly determined to kill as many of their own race as possible:

Blacks were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders

 In 2008, the homicide victimization rate for blacks (19.6 homicides per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (3.3 homicides per 100,000).

 The victimization rate for blacks peaked in the early 1990s, reaching a high of 39.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1991 (figure 17).

 After 1991, the victimization rate for blacks fell until 1999, when it stabilized near 20 homicides per 100,000.

 In 2008, the offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000) (figure 18).

 The offending rate for blacks showed a similar pattern to the victimization rate, peaking in the early 1990s at a high of 51.1 offenders per 100,000 in 1991.

 After 1991, the offending rate for blacks declined until it reached 24 per 100,000 in 2004. The rate has since fluctuated, increasing to 28.4 offenders per 100,000 in 2006 before falling again to 24.7 offenders per 100,000 in 2008.

Keep in mind that the above numbers pre-date “the Ferguson effect.” It turns out, sadly, that after blacks succeed in driving the much-reviled cops out of their communities, the killing escalates:

“We are in the midst of a very abrupt, precipitous and large crime increase,” says Richard Rosenfeld, a respected criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of a study released Wednesday by the Justice Department examining reasons for the increase.

“That’s a far larger percentage increase than in nearly any other year we’ve seen over the last couple of decades,” Rosenfeld says.

[snip]

But there’s another potential explanation that does, what Rosenfeld and others call the “Ferguson effect.” It refers to the August 2014 shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Rosenfeld concludes in his study that some of the increase may be attributable to “some version of the Ferguson effect.”

In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period.

[snip]

Through the end of May, shooting incidents in Chicago were up 53 percent over the same period in 2015, which had already seen a significant increase over 2014. Compared with the first five months of 2014, shooting incidents in 2016 were up 86 percent. Certain police districts saw larger spikes. The Harrison District on the West Side, encompassing West Humboldt Park, for example, had a 191 percent increase in homicides through the end of May. Shootings in May citywide averaged nearly 13 a day, a worrisome portent for summer.

[snip]

In 2014, blacks in Chicago made up 79 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, 85 percent of all known robbery suspects, and 77 percent of all known murder suspects, according to police department data. Whites were 1 percent of known nonfatal shootings suspects in 2014, 2.5 percent of known robbery suspects, and 5 percent of known murder suspects, the latter number composed disproportionately of domestic homicides.

[snip]

The Emanuel-appointed Police Accountability Task Force claimed that police shooting data give “validity to the widely held belief that the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” The task force pointed to the fact that of the 404 individuals shot by the police between 2008 and 2015, both fatally and nonfatally, 74 percent (or 299) were black, and 8 percent (or 33) were white. Predictably, the task force said not one word about black and white crime rates, which were even more disproportionate in 2015 than in 2014. In 2015, blacks were 80 percent of all known murder suspects and 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in 2015 and 1.4 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects. And blacks were overwhelmingly the victims of criminal shootings as well. In 2015, 2,460 blacks were shot lethally and nonlethally, or nearly seven blacks a day. By contrast, roughly 30 blacks were shot lethally and nonlethally by the police in all of 2015. Those 2,460 black victims of criminal shootings constituted nearly 81 percent of all known shooting victims. Seventy-eight whites were shot in 2015, or one white every 4.6 days, constituting 2.5 percent of all known shooting victims. If 74 percent of police shootings have black subjects, that is because officer use of force is going to occur most frequently where the police are trying to protect the law-abiding from armed and dangerous suspects—and that is in predominantly minority neighborhoods.

When it comes to killing, black lives don’t matter to the people doing the vast majority of that killing: blacks.

It’s not just felonious killing that’s the issue in black communities. There’s also a huge problem with legally sanctioned killing in the form of abortions. In state after state, black women abort their babies in numbers far in excess of black representation in the overall population. In 2013, in Louisiana, black women had 60% of abortions despite blacks being only 32% of the population. In New York in 2012, there were more black babies aborted than born alive.

[B]lack teenagers between 15 and 19 years old have an abortion rate of 41 per 1,000 women, more than twice the national average of 18 per 1,000. In comparison, white teenagers have an abortion rate of 10 per 1,000 women, which means that African-American teenagers are having abortions at a rate that is about four times higher than that of their white counterparts.

When it comes to eugenic-style race decimation, black lives don’t matter to the people in the forefront of purging black lives: blacks.

Black lives in America are being destroyed in other ways as well. Take the matter of single-mother homes, which statistically consign any children raised in those homes to a lifetime of poverty. Single motherhood is soaring across America, throughout all racial demographics. Numerically, there are now more single white mothers than there are single black mothers — but that’s reasonable given that there are many more white women in America than black women.

What’s more interesting is the percentage of women within a specific race who opt to go it alone. In 2011, 67.8% of black women had children without fathers, while only 26% of white, non-Hispanic women made that choice. In Chicago today, the numbers are even worse: “Fatherlessness in the city’s black community is at a cataclysmic level—close to 80 percent of children are born to single mothers in high-crime areas.”

Worse, when there are multiple children living with a single mother, it’s highly likely that none of those children share a father. To the extent that men roll into and out of the home, each of those men is a significant threat to any child with whom the man does not share any genetic material:

A 2001 study in Child Maltreatment found that “the presence of a non-biological father figure in the home should be considered a significant predictor of a future child maltreatment report.” In a sample of 644 mother-child pairs, the authors found no significant difference in maltreatment between mother-father households and single-mother households, but did find that children with a cohabiting “father surrogate” were “twice as likely to be reported for maltreatment after his entry into the home.”

When it comes to putting black children at risk, black lives don’t matter to the people who too often make life choices dangerous to black children: blacks.

Although I contend that, with the loony tunes having taken over American academia, kids leave college less educated than they were when they entered, the reality is that education in America is still a predictor of economic success. Heck, being able to read and do math with ease is a predictor of economic success. Unskilled labor is physically hard and pays badly. Skilled work, whether blue or white collar, still brings in those middle-class dollars. So how are blacks doing in school? Badly:

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

I don’t believe that this differential has anything to do with overall intelligence. Instead, I’m pretty sure that black academic failure has a great deal to do with a culture that still castigates education as a “white” thing, unworthy of blacks.

When it comes to putting black children at economic risk, black lives don’t matter to a racial subgroup that denigrates education: blacks.

The biggest threat to black health and well-being in America is other blacks. Yet if you look at the Democrat race mongers, whether in politics, entertainment, or the media, when they decry problems in black America, none will ever say that black communities need to step up to improve their own lives. Instead, it’s all a blame game: whites, Republicans, Congress, Jews, teachers, police, racism . . . you name it, they’ve got a finger pointed anywhere other than their own behaviors.

And maybe, just maybe, blacks wouldn’t be enraged to the point of killing if the first black American president, instead of continuing the Kabuki theater of focusing on everything but blacks’ own behavior said this:

“Yes, there is racism in America. Yes, there are racist cops and just plain bad or stupid cops. But here’s the deal: At some point, the black community has to take responsibility for itself. It’s not up to the cops, good or bad, to stop you from aborting blacks, killing blacks, and consigning future generations of blacks (those who escape abortion) to lifetimes of poverty. You need to make the change. You need to take advantage of educational opportunities. You need to stay away from drugs. You need to get married before starting a family. And you need to stop killing each other. And here’s a thought to chew on: When you stop engaging in these suicidal behaviors, you might find that you’re on the receiving end of fewer behaviors that you claim are racist.”

UPDATE: I’ve been drowning in legal work for the past week, which has prevented me from adding a few thoughts to what I wrote above. I finally have a little time, though, so I thought I’d offer the following update:

I am not the only one to have noticed a problem within the black community that only blacks can fix. People with a much more intimate understanding of the problems of black crime, poor relationships between blacks and the police, and the overall, visible failure of a sadly significant portion of the black community, have weighed in along the same lines that I have. These words by a black police officer are “must read” material in that regard.

I simply want to state here what I didn’t include in the original post, which is that I recognize that the majority of American blacks are just ordinary folk: hard working, law abiding, etc. The problem is that there is a large and visible minority of blacks — especially in Democrat-run cities — who are not ordinary folks and, indeed, who too often prey on those in their community who struggle to live ordinary lives.

The Black Lives Matter movement insists that this sub population is the sole creation of white privilege and tyranny, and therefore that blacks as a whole have no responsibility to repair the terrible tears in the fabric of too many black lives. I believe that’s wrong. I believe that the black community can only be prepared when it stops looking to the government (especially the Democrat Party) for help and starts working on itself.

To that end, BLM shouldn’t be blocking freeways and attacking cops; its members should be marching through the slums of Detroit, LA, NY, DC, and Chicago, exhorting the residents to raise themselves up. The fact that BLM wouldn’t dream of going to those places and making those demands, not on white people two thousand miles away, but on the black residents themselves, but instead confines its efforts to sun-dappled, expensive college campuses, and relatively safe neighborhoods in urban communities, speaks volumes about BLM’s goals, all of which involve divisive shakedowns, rather than community uplift.

I found some clever Hillary cartoons. Before I get to them, though, a word to those who think Comey cleared Hillary. He didn’t. What he did was akin to a prosecutor summing up a case at the close of trial and then, having given chapter and verse of the overwhelming evidence against the defendant, suddenly announcing, “And in closing, I’d like to announce that we’re dropping the case against defendant.”

Comey made the case; he just dropped it for unknown reasons. Best guesses are morally craven, pursuing his own agenda (keeping Biden or Bernie or Trump out of the White House), subject to overwhelming pressure of the type we can’t imagine (e.g., blackmail), or refusing to risk his own or his family’s health.

“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

– FBI Director James Comey, 5 July 2016, announcing that the FBI had concluded its investigation of Hillary’s handling of our nation’s classified information and would not recommend that DOJ file charges (full text here).

I could not believe this morning’s press conference. First, FBI Director James Comey laid out facts establishing that Hillary Clinton violated our laws regarding classified information. Then, he said that he would not recommend prosecution. Good God, we are now living in a banana republic. The politically connected are above the law.

Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system in order to hide her activities while Secretary of State from being made public pursuant to FOIA requests and legal process. She sent and received classified information across her private system, she stored the information on her private system, and the system was not only subject to hacking, but being run by people almost certainly without the security clearances to allow them such access. She should be in jail for life plus several centuries. Had anyone else done this, they would be.

What Comey did to exonerate Hillary was make up his own set of “straw men” laws, then burn them down. Let me explain.

The facts Comey laid out in his press conference can only be described as damning. They don’t present a judgment call, they present jury questions under at least three statutes.

Here are the facts that Comey laid out in his speech. All are quotations, with my comments in brackets:

Of course the fix was in. No way was a Democrat administration going to let its primary candidate be indicted. The next thing the optimists are dreaming about is outraged FBI agents going rogue and spilling the beans on all the wrongdoing found about Hillary.

To which I say not going to happen. As I wrote some months ago, job security is going to be more important to 99.9% of the agents than truth and honor. (Sorry, FBI guys and gals, but you know it’s true.) As for the other 0.1% who might be inclined to go rogue, they know that the media will quash anything they have to say.

The great thing for Progressives is that voters who might have felt icky about casting a vote for a woman under investigation, can now hold up their heads proudly and say, “The FBI cleared her.”

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff. Why? Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

Like a dog with an old bone, I’m still gnawing away at the Brock Allen Turner rape case, which I blogged about at some length here. I can sum up that long post thusly: When both parties to sexual intercourse are grotesquely drunk and the victim has no memory of the entire evening — including whether or not she consented to the act — it is unjust to find the man guilty of rape, which is an intentional act.

I’ve seen two objections to this argument. The first is that Turner’s running away when third parties caught him in the act shows a consciousness of guilt. The second is that, even if the victim drunkenly consented to sex, when she became unconscious she withdrew that consent. I disagree with both those arguments.

As to the first — that running away showed a consciousness of guilt — it’s just as reasonable to believe that turner was (a) frightened or (b) conscious of a different type of guilty; namely, that it’s not the done thing in America to have sex out of doors in front of an audience. Moreover, because Turner was so drunk (more than two times over the legal limit) and the victim was unconscious and lacked any memory of events, neither of the two people most closely involved in the activity can explain what was going through Turner’s drink-befuddled mind when he ran.

Regarding the second argument — that the victim’s passing out withdrew consent — that assumes that Turner was aware that she had passed out. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that he was not aware of the victim’s changed mental status. First, if Turner was as drunk as his blood test indicates, his cognitive functioning was grossly impaired. If the victim exhaled a puff of air or a grunt every time he thrust into her, that could have been enough for his intoxicated mind to register consciousness on her part.

Second, and this is not very complimentary to men who care about their partner’s happiness, there are large classes of men for whom sex is entirely about their own pleasure. Once they’ve engaged in minimal foreplay (assuming they even bother), they view their partner merely as a receptacle, not as a participant in a mutual act.

Guys, women talk. And because women talk, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard about guys who lose all interest in their partner when they’re getting their rocks off. Women describe just lying there, waiting for the act to end, aware that the guy has mentally transformed them into a life-sized Japanese sex doll.

And it’s not just the women I know doing the talking. It’s also a standard trope in romance novels that the heroine has had to suffer through some oaf’s insensitive sex, something that makes her all the more aware that the romantic hero, when he finally makes love to her, is a truly wonderful person who cares about her pleasure. Heck, there are whole mythologies built around the claim that Victorian brides were admonished to handle the sex act by “Lying there and thinking of England.” There’s a sexual approach that works well for men who find it a waste of time to continue the “love-making” throughout the entire act of sex.

With all of this is mind, I think it’s valid to accept that, whether because of a selfish nature or complete intoxication, Turner may have found his partner’s satisfaction totally irrelevant. He would be just one in a long line of men who feel that, as the woman is warm and breathing, he has no obligation or interest in checking with her to make sure she’s enjoying herself or that she’s even awake.

It’s therefore entirely possible that Turner had no idea the victim had withdrawn consent by passing out. He may just have appreciated the fact that she wasn’t constantly insisting that she take care of her needs when all he wanted to do was take care of his own. That makes him an insensitive jerk, but not a rapist.

And one more thing: Remember when I blogged about the liberal friend — an otherwise wonderful woman whose friendship I cherish — who felt that a woman should always be believed if she claims to have been raped? She apologized to me for having that attitude. She found so disturbing the notion that a young man’s whole future would be jettisoned in a situation in which it was impossible to tell if non-consensual sex had occurred, just because the gal felt violated afterward, that she rethought entirely the current system that instantly convicts a man, no evidence required.

The best system, of course, is one that simultaneously believes the woman’s accusations (treating her with respect and concern) and believes the man’s protestations of innocence (so as not to treat him like a criminal) until the entire matter has been tried in a court of law, using the stringent principles of due process that we developed over the years.

If you haven’t heard about the Stanford rape case that is riveting all my Progressive friends, here is a brief summary: In January 2015, the unnamed 23-year-old victim went to a party, drank, and passed out. She has no memory of what happened after that. Witnesses, however, found her half-naked and unconscious behind a Dumpster, with Brock Allen Turner atop her. They corralled Turner, a champion Stanford swimmer, and held him until police arrived.

In March 2016, Turner was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault. The case would have vanished from most people’s radar at this point were it not for the fact that the trial court judge, Aaron Persky, a Stanford alumnus, elected to give Turner a very light sentence: six months in jail and three years probation. The Persky’s reasoning was that “[a] prison sentence would have a severe impact on him. I think he will not be a danger to others.”

The blogosphere went insane, with people publishing Turner’s picture and not so subtly implying that, when he emerges from prison, he should be lynched. Buzzfeed (the outlet that won’t bake cakes for conservatives) went so far as to publish the statement that the victim prepared for the sentencing phase of the trial. You can read the whole thing here. It makes for sad reading because this woman has lost her sense of physical inviolability. Something bad happened to her body, even though she was unaware at the time, and she suffers greatly. I’m just going to include a portion of her statement, though:

I met up the other day with some friends whom I’ve known for years through our children. They are, without exception, decent, bright, extremely kind women. I think highly of them, even though they are Bernie supporters.

The conversation turned to the “rape culture” on American campuses. Although they were agreed that a woman who is proven to have falsely accused a man of rape should be punished, they differed from me in three significant areas: (1) They believe absolutely the CDC study saying 1 in 5 American women have been raped; (2) they think that, if a woman says she was raped, she should be believed absolutely; and (3) they think girls should not be given advice about how to protect themselves because, if they still get raped, having been armed against rape implies that any resulting rape was their fault. I’d like to spend a little time on each point.

There is no sense of normalcy in the world for me when a committed old communist and a reality TV star are the leading contenders in America’s upcoming presidential election. My round-up addresses some of the craziness, as well as lots of other stuff.

Debunking Ted Cruz myths. Like me, my friend Trevor Loudon supports Ted Cruz, seeing him as the candidate who is most deeply invested in returning American government to its constitutional framework. He’s therefore posted at his site a detailed article debunking many of the most ugly myths and insults hurled at Ted Cruz. Whether or not you support Cruz, you might find the post illuminating. And no, Ted Cruz didn’t steal Iowa, isn’t in league with McConnell, isn’t a globalist, and doesn’t make his employees hate him.

Thomas Sowell endorses Ted Cruz. Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest living economists and intelligent thinkers. The fact that he endorses Ted Cruz — an endorsement given extra urgency with Justice Scalia’s death — should mean a great deal.

The trouble with Trump. The South Carolina debate is long gone, and the primary is tomorrow, but if you have a minute, read Ace’s analysis of Trump’s attack on George W. Bush during the S.C. debate. Ace offers an important analysis of the trouble with Trump, and it’s the fact that his ego leaves no room for anyone else’s.

On Trump and political blogging. Neo-Neocon has written a really superb piece about the nature of political blogging when you’re a blogger like me: you’ve been around for a long time, you have a wonderful crew of dedicated readers, you can’t get traction with a larger audience, and your thought process is just plodding enough when you think about a story that you miss the news cycle and the caravan has already moved on when you finally publish an important insight or factual data point. (Neo-Neocon is a much better writer and thinker than I, so her story is sadder than mine. She should have so much more traction than she does.) Anyway, Neo-Neocon shares her insights into Trump’s hollering that “Bush lied and people died” — insights that are unlike any others out there, and that are also a whole lot better and more informative than you got from the first 24-hour news cycle.

Trump thinks he’s Bernie Sanders. Trump went to MSNBC to have his ego massaged . . . I mean, to sell himself to the 360 Progressives who still watch that channel, and amused his small audience when he confused himself with Bernie Sanders. Really. Meanwhile, Cruz, Rubio, and Carson offered thoughtful political commentary at C-SPAN.

As those of you who are lawyers or who have served on a jury know, I can’t talk about the case beyond saying that it’s a criminal case. In any event, I don’t have anything to say. Today was devoted to jury selection and it was a . . . very . . . slow . . . process. After over three hours, the judge and the lawyers just barely finished questioning the first batch of 18 prospective jurors. None of them have been dismissed yet. I was not in that first batch.

What impressed me throughout this very laborious, time-consuming procedure was how seriously the fifty people assembled in the courtroom took the process. Everyone listened carefully and politely to the court clerk and to the judge. The 18 people who were asked questions that related directly to potential bias answered thoughtfully and struggled to be honest.

Unlike the last voir dire I sat through two or three years ago, none of the 18 tried to give an answer that would excuse service. All but one seemed to believe that, regardless of their personal experiences, some of which bore more heavily on the case than others, they could be impartial jurors who would render their verdict solely on the facts and law revealed during the trial.

What also struck me was the incredibly narrow demographic spread revealed by those 18 people: With two exceptions they were all college graduates, and most had an advanced degree. Except for two full-time moms, they were all employed and some of them had some pretty fine-sounding job titles. I obviously can’t share any specifics with you, but I can say that there were CEOs, CFOs, department heads, JDs, MDs — basically all the people I’d run into at the average event at my kids’ public schools. Marin is a very different place.

The room was also extremely white. Marin people may love the idea of diversity in theory, but in fact they’re seeking out people of the same shade of pallor. I won’t give any specifics about those in the room who weren’t white, but let me just say that I could count them on the fingers of one hand with a few fingers left over (more or less).

My suspicion is that I’ll be dismissed tomorrow. The fact is that I’ve never met a lawyer who’s been chosen to serve on a jury and I doubt I’ll be the first one to break that pattern. Nevertheless, I’ll say what so many of my lawyer friends have also said: it would be interesting to see a case from the jury’s side, rather than from the lawyer’s.

I have sitting in front of me a piece of a very juicy story that’s happening in real-time — and I can’t do anything about it right now! Two things stop me: The first is that, as I said, I currently only have a piece, and I need more information to understand fully what is going on; the second is that I don’t know yet whether what’s happening is operating under a confidentiality agreement.

The fact that I got some of the information means that someone (and I know who) violated confidentiality, but the whole thing is too sensitive for me to charge into. I’m going to keep an eye on things, though, and I’ll let you know when/if I have a real story. Meanwhile….

On guns, using Alinsky against the Alinsky-ites

Saul Alinksy may have had an ugly ideology, but he was a master tactician. One of his mandates is that you have to make your political enemy play by his own rules. The Virginia GOP is making noises about doing just that, although I doubt GOPers will have the courage of their convictions:

They probably didn’t anticipate the backlash they’ve received, which includes calls to recall or impeach Attorney General Mark Herring, and pushes for legislation that will both strip elected officials of the ability to make such unilateral decisions, and get a little payback.

Herring’s announcement came three weeks before the start of the General Assembly session, which is controlled by Republicans. In November, a bill was filed that would require Virginia to recognize permits from other states. If approved, it would reverse Herring’s ruling.

Carrico said he’ll address the issue come January.

“A lot of the governor’s power is deferred to the General Assembly at that point and I’ll be getting with my collegues to circumvent everything this governor has done on this point,” he said. “I have a budget amendment that I’m looking at to take away his executive protection unit. If he’s so afraid of guns, then I’m not going to surround him with armed state policemen.”

It would be fruitless and damaging to try stripping Hillary Clinton of her Secret Service detail. Having said that, it would be brilliant if, at every campaign stop, people ask her why, because she is such a strong anti-gun campaigner, she shouldn’t be stripped of that armed coverage. And I’d love to see the same question asked of Obama at town halls.

I suspect both will reply that they need security because they’re targets. Statistically speaking, though, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the average citizen of Chiraq is just as likely to be a target — the only difference is that the Chiraquian cannot defend himself (or have others defend him).

Although the question of Muslim refugees is no longer front page news, the Left is still keeping up the relentless drumbeat that those of us who oppose unfettered Syrian and Islamic immigration into America are racist, “Islamophobic,”* and unconstitutional. We’re told it’s wrong of us to judge the many by the bad actions of a few and that we’re running counter to our legal system’s insistence that people are innocent until proven guilty.

This is misdirection. We are not as a nation trying to obtain a criminal conviction against today’s immigrant because of a specific terrorist act committed by yesterday’s immigrant. Instead, we are engaging in intelligent risk analysis which is consistent with American law and tradition, with sanity, and with national survival. We aren’t doing anything that shames us.

That we shouldn’t be embarrassed hasn’t stopped the Left, of course, I keep seeing posts and articles by or about this good Muslim or that group of good Syrian Muslims. Today’s example, from the WaPo, is about Syrian refugees in England who helped out when floods hit:

According to reports in the Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, a group of Syrian refugees has been working in Littleborough, Greater Manchester, shoveling sand into sandbags to help avert more flooding.

“We saw the pictures on TV and wanted to help,” Yasser al-Jassem, a 35-year-old teacher, told the Guardian, adding that the people of Greater Manchester had been good to him and others in his group and that they wanted to help in response.

Good for those guys! That’s precisely what people who have been given refuge in another land should be doing. I wish all of them were moved by that spirit of gratitude. I’d love to see thousands of stories precisely like that one.

In addition to the “watch these Muslims being good citizens” stories, I also keep seeing posts and articles in which Muslims state “I, personally, am a good person, so you need to get off my back and start using my example as a reason to stop judging all Muslims as potential terrorists.” The most recent example of that phenomenon, again from the WaPo, was the stridently self-righteous post from Rana Elmir, the deputy director of the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, saying that she is not her Muslim brother’s keeper:

This is what comes from the fact that I don’t watch late night TV shows. If I did, I would have seen Jimmy Fallon praise Lt. Clay Higgins of St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. Lt. Higgins is awesome. Every week, he does a little crime stoppers video for the local news station, describing the crime (usually property crimes), speaking on behalf of the good people or businesses who were victimized, and getting in touch with the bad guys, reminding them that they hurt someone and that an unpleasant future awaits them. This is a perfect example:

On Saturday, March 14th, a portable generator was stolen from this carport, located on Willie Young Rd., in Eunice.

It was a small Coleman Powermate generator, about 10 years old, with a red frame, valued at around 900 dollars. A small generator, but to us, a serious crime. Evidence shows that the thief came right onto the carport, removed the tarp that covered the generator and fled the scene.

If you know anything about this theft, or if you saw something suspicious on Willie Young Rd., call us.

If you’re the one who stole this mans generator, pay attention, I’m talking to you now… the man you stole from is well known in these parts, he’s a kind, generous man. If you needed his help, you could’ve asked, but now, we won’t stop looking for you. . . . and if you return to this man’s home to steal again . . . have your affairs in order.